WHY WE SHOULD NOT DEFEND OURSELVES WITH OUT SEATS

The back story: the group Apocalypso formed from the Chicago-area Tower Players and had the distinction of a) winning second place in Cafe Voltaire's Polar Bear in Heat improv contest, losing only to ImprovOlympic uber-team Jane, then at the height of its estrogen-packed power, and b) putting on a two sketch comedy shows before evolving into the children's theater troupe 'Calypso. Finally, it evolved itself into oblivion.

But I write not to bury Apocalypso, but to praise it, or however Shakespeare wrote it. We called the first show, "Are you there, God? It's me, Brezhnev" for the cold war and growing up themes strung throughout. I designed the poster and the logo which, for the same reason why you don't see re-runs of "The Duck Factory", will not be featured here.

For the three who saw it, God bless your little hearts. For the rest of you, keep your tear ducts dry because, while Andy Eninger did a great job directing us, and we did a decent job writing, we were like twelve Clydesdales pulling in twelve separate directions. That Andy held us together as long as he did speaks well of his brilliance and patience. I had a bug up my ass about NASA, which, just before Pathfinder's Mars mission, didn't seem to be doing anything particularly interesting besides launching spy satellites and making tomatoes grow for nine days in orbit. If you think it makes for dull cocktail-party conversation, try putting it into sketch form. Andy made me re-write it three times and it still didn't get any laughs until I wrote a V3.5 version where the tour guide calls the first man on the moon, "Armstring." I can feel your chuckles already.

Steve Heinrich wrote a then-current political commentary on militias, basically a six-hicks-in-a-shack scenario that I hated because it didn't have anything do do with NASA. There goes that bug again. Nevertheless, no one asked me, so I grudgingly took my place in the scene, getting laughs through hick humor and cursing the lowest-common-denominator approach to sketch comedy but knowing no better.

Then I remembered Bart Kias.

Bart had worked on a sketch comedy show in college called "Pocketchange Theater". Due to schedule issues, a budget of zero and slacker attitudes, we cranked out all of four episodes in two years. It looks good, but I've seen better done faster. Bart was a stand-up comedian who disdained improv but excelled at it. He would take a script, memorize it to perfection and then improvise and/or rewrite lines as needed. I hated when other people did that to my stuff, but not Bart. He rewrote elegantly, often compressing a long, less-funny line into a smarter, funnier, more concise bit that fit so well I wondered why I hadn't thought of it to begin with.

I decided to give myself the humble job of rewriting a single line. Since egos on the production ran high, I wanted to make sure the substitution would be unassailable, so I spent most of a night coming up with the list you've just read, plus some others I threw out since they're not funny to me any more. It had always been my plan to put it on a web site; in fact, you might say I learned HTML so I could have a place to publish weird-ass projects like this. Certainly, few people outside of Letterman publish lists, and those that do are almost immediately branded as Letterman ripoffs. It's all part of evolution, and those who do not change, die.

The atheist's farewell, in place of "God be with you":

If you stay away from your chair, you probably won't.